2009-09-05

Saddam the Humanist

Before Saddam ended up swinging from a rope, the FBI had an opportunity to interview him.

I recall the words of Dale Carnegie in "How to Win Friends and Influence People". That even terrible criminals do not consider themselves to be bad. Don't admit they were bad and selfish and instead come up with a lot of spin to make themselves look good. This was quite a revelation to me at the time. I assumed it was just a matter of getting to the root definitions and then having people admit that they were wrong. I thought the USSR would do that too. Dogma was a big thing getting in the way there. They had a dogmatic belief that by trading with others, capitalists were "exploiting" others. Marx said so!

I would have liked more information on how he could seriously believe what Baghdad Bob was telling him, and whether such gross misunderstandings could suggest that he had other gross misunderstandings. But I guess we can do that with basically any Democrat who is convinced that Republicans eat babies and sit around plotting their next dastardly attack on blacks.

Anyway, here are some choice quotes.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/02.pdf

"He added that, as a humanitarian, he hoped the same for the American people".

By the way, as an aside, let me say that he mentions God a lot, and the Quran, but the uselessness of books like this lies in the fact that he says he fears God, yet there's nothing in the Quran that says that if he runs a cruel dictatorship and doesn't allow dissent, God will send him to Hell.

Similar to the semi-uselessness of the bible that arranged for Christians to not work on the Sabbath, while simultaneously allowing slavery.

I mean, what sort of priorities are these?

Continuing.

Honestly, prior to the war, I believed that Saddam had WMD. Just as I currently believe that Libya doesn't. In the first case I know I was wrong. In the second, who knows. Only Gaddafi knows that for sure. Maybe he has a second secret program. I can only go by my best guess that Gaddafi has truly disarmed, and thus there are far higher priorities than Libya. But at the time, there was no higher priority than Iraq.

From my logical point of view, if you want to avoid war with the West, you have to convince them that you are no threat. Saddam was instead acting very cagily, for reasons that were only truly known to him. Until now, anyway. You can see his answer to this question:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/23.pdf

"Hussein was reminded of a speech he gave in June, 2000, where he stated that he would not disarm until the region was disarmed".

He explains that he didn't want Iran to know that Iraq was weak. Honestly, what a moron. He's projecting on to Iran. As much of nutcases as the Iranian dictatorship is, I don't see any attempt to launch military attacks on others. Saddam assumes that because he wants to expand his dictatorship, everyone else is the same.

In the same article, he says it was completed by 1998.

And here:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/05.pdf

"Hussein further acknowledged Iraq made a mistake by destroying some weapons without UN supervision".

we can see the doofus is at least smart enough to realise he brought this on himself.

Note that I personally would have given priority to Iraq even if I knew for sure he didn't have WMD. Simply because Iraq is the country full of Arabs where liberal democracy is most likely to succeed. It was imperative to know why Arab Muslims were the only group of people in the world where there was no sign of liberal democracy taking hold, and instead, it was generating terrorists. What was causing this strange ideological position where people would give their lives to kill some Americans instead of giving their lives for the freedom of their own countries?

The Iraqis were the best ones to answer that question.

Once we had the answer (which we now do - message 666), we can more-or-less waltz into places like Saudi Arabia and say "You have 2 months to start looking like Iraq. If we don't see a shitload of progress by then, we're going to start shooting rulers". Without Iraq as an example, our only options to respond to the horrible ideology that caused 9/11 were:

These are all crap solutions. First of all we didn't know what percentage of people actually supported Osama. We don't have a secret ballot to find out. Secondly, we don't give an opportunity for the percentage of good people to save their lives. Thirdly, we don't know what is causing this strange ideology in the first place. If we lose this opportunity, we may squash our chances at finding out what causes Timothy McVeigh to act too. You can't kill every white male American like McVeigh on the offchance that he might attack America. There has to be a better way. Or at least, let's make a reasonable attempt to find one.

Incidentally, when I started posting on the Iraqi blogs, I started off by advocating option 4 above. Obviously I didn't really want to do that, but I wanted to pose the question, because at that time I was unable to put my finger on who the enemy was, and wanted someone to reply with "there's no need to kill ALL Muslims, including Muslims in America. The enemy is only xyz". Without Iraq, I couldn't get an answer to xyz, and it was extremely important to know the answer to that, because I couldn't promote my own ideology (a vague "freedom fighter" was apparently insufficient, given that that's what Arafat called himself) when I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT WAS. I was hoping these people could tell me.

There was a vague "Christian vs Muslim" mentioned, but it failed to take into account the atheists (including myself) who were also championing the "Christian" side of the war. And of course then we were faced with the bloggers themselves, some of whom were Muslims. After a lot of discussion, I was finally able to say "the war is between non-humanists and anti-non-humanists". Message 666 was to come later after I had broken down the major examples of non-humanism that inspired me to fight (or perhaps, strongly support the fight, the same way I strongly supported law and order in Australia). E.g. I'm very used to people attacking whites. But it's insufficient to say that I'm an anti-anti-white. Because I also object to the Japanese massacring Chinese. Even the Nazis couldn't stomach that cruelty. The answer was simple, and obvious, in hindsight. It's simply "anti-racist", using the true meaning of the word, instead of the left-wing meaning of the word which is "anti-white".

Note that sometimes the whites are the aggressors as well as the victims. E.g. reports of Dutch people spitting on innocent Germans who never did a damn thing to Holland. Pretty likely the spitter was a Christian too. We can't have a nice, peaceful world if there are going to be attacks on innocent people like that occur.

Note that someone else was able to generalize even message 666 for me. These different things that people were attacking based on were all examples of AGGREGATION. And that the secret then is to eliminate all these forms of aggregation. It's a bit like saying that all blonde women are dumb. I'm not arguing for a banning of blonde jokes any more than trying to stop NZers from saying Australian jokes. It's all in good humour (and I'll leave you with one of the best I've heard at the end). I'm just saying it is an example of aggregation and that the solution to this is to treat people as individuals. But it's insufficient to just say "treat everyone as individuals". Men seem to have an inherent desire to prove their bravery. Fine. Let's work with that. Teach men to fight aggregators! It's a noble cause and you will be judged by how many aggregators you manage to defeat. Of course, the surreptitious side-effect of this is to just prevent him from being an aggregator himself. He internalizes his opposition to aggregation, ensuring that everyone gets treated as an individual.

There's the solution. The solution has been available for 5 years now. And at this rate, the solution will continue to only be adopted in a haphazard accidental manner by people who find themselves heading in that direction for reasons unknown to them. Oh well. Maybe I should put some more useful keywords in my writing to reach a wider more typical worldwide audience? Worth a shot.